How can I have redundancy for incomming calls?

[fishfilet]

I have two trunks set up each with a different company. On the outbound route it will fail over two the second if the first is down. What I was wondering is how can I go about setting up redundancy for the inbound calls. For instance if my main trunk has our DID's and it fails then we won't be able to have incoming calls. This will be important because we are thinking of replacing our PRI compleetely with SIP trunks but it will need to be reliable.

Has anyone got a solution?

Thanks!

 

[jroper]

Hi


Most of our customers maintain both landines and VoIP. VoIP is used first, and if there is a failure, the landlines are used.

DID's supplied inbound are directed first to VoIP, and if offline to the Landline.

Joe

 

[jmullinix]

Aretta provides this service also. If a call cannot be delivered by VOIP they will ring an alternate DID with the call.

 

[fishfilet]

OK, I will check with my VoIP provider and see if they can ring another DID if my trunk is down.

 

[OTA]

What are your current plans for if the PRI goes down? Or your internet connection went down? It still amazes me how little faith people put in SIP.

At least in Florida with it's archaic PSTN, I've found SIP & internet to be far more reliable than the ILEC. Even more reliable than the ILEC's POTS. The only POTS lines you'll find in my offices are fax machines and alarm systems. Even dial-up modems sit on the SIP trunks.

From what I've seen, focus on finding a quality SIP provider first. These will be the few who are willing to give a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Many won't -- avoid them.

Next, make sure you have a reliable internet connection with plenty of bandwidth. Depending on what is available to you, this might mean getting a dedicated connection for VoIP, upgrading an existing connection's bandwidth to well more than you need, traffic shaping, or some combination thereof.

Get those two lined up, test them thoroughly, and you'll find the reliability you're looking for.

 

[fishfilet]

We currently have no backup for our PRI going down although out PRI is on a SLA. It comes over a T1 so it is about as reliable as it gets.

Our internet conection for our sip trunks will be a T1 also with a SLA so from that perspective it is sound. But what I was wondering about is the provider themseves. The only reason I bring it up is we are new to VoIP and SIP so I don't know what the reliablity of these companies are.

Who can you recomend that provides a SLA. I am curently thinking of going with teliax.com, telasip.com, and or vitelity.com.

 

[OTA]

I don't believe any of the providers you've listed offer SLAs.

I'm currently using Bandwidth.com where SLAs are needed. They're a bit pricey if you're not a heavy phone user and are paying their retail rates. Not much of an online interface for SIP account management, but you just email/call their staff up instead. BUT as long as you don't oversubscribe to more channels than necessary or have enough traffic to justify wholesale origination/termination then it's quite a value.

One of the local CLECs had great things to say about CBeyond, but unfortunately they only have a limited service area.